Bot-OX

Applicant(s)

Description

Bot-OX is a framework that allows ORF-Journalists to quickly generate Facebook Messenger Chat-Bots, that can be used to collect all kinds of data or information from our users. With Bot-OX we hope to bring crowdsourced investigations to a new level.
Bot-OX helps to overcome 2 challenges in crowdsourced investigations:
- finding the right people that are able to contribute valuable data or information
- motivating people to actually contribute to the 'wisdom of the crowds' with their knowledge.
For many (young) people using a Chat-App like Facebook Messenger is a more intuitive way of answering questions and hopefully also a more fun way then filling out boring forms. Furthermore Facebook Messenger helps to reach an audience, that would otherwise be very hard to reach.
ORF-Journalists and Social Media-Editors can use the intuitive Bot-OX backend to create a sequence of questions that a FB-messenger-bot can then ask to FB-users.
In our casestudy we are using Bot-OX to create a Chat-Box that collects detailed results from the Austrian Centralised School Leaving Examination.
Since the Austrian Ministry of Education refuses to publish the results on a detailed school by school
We are using 3 ways to motivate users to talk to our chatbot:
- Embeding a link to the chatbot and a Messenger-code in our reporting on the topic
- Putting an 'Infobox' on our Facebook-Page that links to the Messenger-Bot
- Placing a Facebook-Ad aimed at our very specific target group that is able to answer our question.
The data that we harvested from the 'wisdom of the crowds' can then be used to generate all kinds of data driven stories, ranging from school-rankings and online-maps, to TV & Radio-reports from schools with interesting and outstanding results.
Generally there are 3 cases where Bot-OX can be used:
- collecting data
- finding interesting cases that can be followed up for reporting
- collecting user generated content in a breaking news situation or for planned events.